Knowledge Management - A Practitioners View

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Exploring YouTube and being impressed!!

I had visited YouTube before but never really explored it in detail. Always thought it contained videos from people who love to shoot themselves do stupid things in life but I surely was surprised when I explored it in detail this weekend. I was searching for videos on Knowledge Management and CRM and saw some very interesting stuff. I also tried searching for videos from technology companies like IBM, Accenture and Capgemini and noticed that there were some good content there which described what these companies were doing the Consulting and Technology space, though the hits they were getting on this wasn't much. But then one thing is for sure the traffic to these links are bound to increase and before long YouTube has a potential to be a major venue for advertising an organizations services and capabilities. The advantage is that these kind of ads will be viewed by people interested in viewing it. Maybe YouTube can open-up a new revenue stream by promoting such ads and get paid on the basis of how many hits a video gets. I am sure this could be case in MySpace and Facebook too. Considering successful work with Google adwords it won't be long before Google taps into this potential (Well Google might have already done by now). Back to presence of technology and consulting companies in YouTube, I was also surprised with the absence of India companies like Infosys, Wipro, TCS and Satyam here. No organization can afford to not be in YouTube for long. I am sure these organizations will be looking at website like YouTube carefully. It's no brainer if someone were to say there would be an explosion of corporate presence in YouTube very soon. Keep buying Google stocks people!!

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

AMR recently came out with the report - AMR Research Finds Spending on Knowledge Management Will Hit $73B in 2007. There will always be debates on the definition of knowledge management, whether knowledge management initiatives provides value or not. I have even read of opinions from people saying that knowledge management is dead. Well if it is dead then what are these companies that AMR has surveyed doing spending so much money on these technologies. I am sure we all agree that this is not restricted to just spending on technologies but also on the KM processes and people too so the actual spending would be lot more than $73B. The point is not how much spending is done but that organizations are still looking for the benefits that they get from knowledge management. I haven't seen the full report but I am sure I would see a shift in these spending from portals and content/document management systems, which have been the so called only technology components of KM for sometime, to enterprise search and collaborative systems and tools. Also this report brings out the emergence of SaaS and Open source technologies in KM implementations. Remains to be seen how much of impetus does this provide to the Open source movement.